Mother and Child Reunion : Male-dominated family dramas are plentiful, but plays about that maddening, magical bond between mothers and daughters have been quite rare--until now.

Shakespeare is the theater’s most comprehensive chronicler of human relationships. On one basic human intimacy, though, he was oddly silent: the powerful, fraught relation between mothers and daughters. Cordelia’s mother (Queen Lear?) is dead. Miranda’s mother is dead, Ophelia’s mother is dead. Gertrude has no daughter. Desdemona has no mother. Helena and Hermia have no mothers to speak of. Hero in “Much Ado” has no mother. Nor does Rosalind in “As You Like It.” Cressida has no mother. There seems to be a pattern.

At the Tiffany Theatre, a new play by Trish Vradenburg, “The Apple Doesn’t Fall . . . ,” focuses on a daughter and her mother with Alzheimer’s who temporarily returns to lucidity and fulfills a very basic female fantasy--that a lost mother could come back and say, “No daughter has ever been loved as much as you are.”

The play is Broadway-bound, scheduled to open at the Lyceum in April. It suffers, unfortunately, from a major case of wish-fulfillment-itis. But whatever its ultimate success in New York, “Apple” joins the ranks of a genre remarkably late in developing--that is, plays about the terrible, beautiful and strangely internal bond between mothers and daughters. Throughout the centuries, stories of mothers and daughters have constituted a black hole in the history of great plays.

The American theater is full of family dramas, and not only because they are cheap to tell, usually requiring only one set. Playwrights tend to tell the stories of their own families, and major playwrights, until quite recently, have been remarkably male. In the American canon, as in Shakespeare, we get lots of fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, and sons and mothers. And while Eugene O’Neill retold the story of drama’s most famous daughter in “Mourning Becomes Electra,” and Tennessee Williams provides an unforgettable portrait of a daughter clinging to the maternal nest in “The Glass Menagerie,” each play is first and foremost a son’s story.

That the classic canon is male is perhaps a boring point, but a more subtle question remains: Is it possible that the mother-daughter bond is less dramatic than other familial relationships? If you put two women together, do the odds go up that one of them will want to avoid confrontation, or resist a definitive mother-child split? Is there less inherent opposition between a mother and a daughter?

The answer, obvious to any mother or daughter, is no, this relationship is not less dramatic, it’s just different. The inevitable separation between parent and child is not as clear when the parent and child are both female and, therefore, culturally and perhaps even biologically determined as nurturers. Sometimes women can convince themselves that they don’t even need to make that break, and the psychological costs of that mirage can be very high, very dramatic and very interesting, as Jane Bowles demonstrated in her 1953 play “In the Summer House.” But this is a story not much told on stage.

There are technical reasons. The odds are that Queen Lear would have raised some objection to Cordelia’s banishment. Historically, mothers have been excluded from certain stories because they would naturally save their daughters from getting into all kinds of interesting trouble.

The cultural-historical explanation for the dearth of these plays is less interesting. With the rise of feminism, more women have written stories about their families. And when we start to get a lot of stories written from the perspective of a daughter, we get a new genre.

But in any case, theater has been slower in contributing to this genre than other media. Mothers and daughters, after all, have produced a sturdy and extremely popular movie genre--the weepy, or so-called woman’s film. From “Stella Dallas” to “Imitation of Life” to “Mildred Pierce” to “Terms of Endearment” and “Beaches,” the story of a mother’s sacrifice for a daughter has long been vital to the economy of the film industry. Screenwriters are more motivated to keep an eye on the box office than are playwrights, who tend to tell their own stories. It has also long been the province of novelists who have easier access than playwrights to characters’ internal lives. From Colette and Virginia Woolf through Jean Rhys, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Jane Smiley and Katherine Harrison, mother-daughter stories abound.

Such stories fill the bestseller lists, but onstage very few have reverberated through the culture. The women’s movement brought a flood of plays in the ‘60s and ‘70s about mothers, daughters, bodies, menstrual blood and birth (“The Story of a Mother: A Ritual Drama,” “Calm Down, Mother”), almost all of which seem embarrassing now. In this century, we also had the weepy melodramas of mother’s sacrifice popular in the ‘20s (such as Lula Vollmer’s “The Shame Woman”) and the protest plays of Rachel Crothers; the more atmospheric literary efforts of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s (Jane Bowles, Lillian Hellman); the feminist theater and protest plays of the ‘60s and ‘70s (Honor Moore, Megan Terry, Ntozake Shange); and on to the more humorous plays of the late ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s (Caryl Churchill, Wendy Wasserstein, Tina Howe) and more epic, multi-generational plays of the late ‘80s and ‘90s (Cheryl West and Cassandra Medley). Two of the most enduring works on the subject are by men: “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (Paul Zindel) and the Arthur Laurents (book)/ Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) musical “Gypsy” (musicals have a much higher ratio for these stories).

In 1983, “ ‘night, Mother” was the first play to reach Broadway with only a mother and daughter as its characters, according to its author, Marsha Norman. “There weren’t any examples to go by,” Norman recalls. “The lack of models was a problem, if only because I kept hearing the skepticism of producers who felt this was not a fitting subject for the stage.”

Norman, who won a Pulitzer for “ ‘night, Mother,” proved that a claustrophobic and largely internal battle between a mother and daughter can provide grounds for a great play. The playwright created a daughter making an extraordinarily definitive separation from her mother--by way of suicide. The middle-aged Jessie, who shares a home with her harmless but annoying mother, decides rationally and coolly that she no longer wants to live. She has failed as a mother (her son is a delinquent) and as a wife, but she is determined to succeed as a daughter even on the night of her suicide.

In fact, in the history of literature there has never been a suicide as considerate as Jessie. The play opens with her collecting old pillows and foam cushions and towels to make as little mess as possible when she shoots herself later--behind a door locked from the inside so that her mother won’t be a suspect in her death.

Jessie’s meticulous concern rests at a bizarre angle to the incredibly violent and hostile act she commits--which is part of what makes the play so disturbing. Norman saw the hatred in a daughter’s compulsive care-taking, and it was perhaps something only a real-life daughter could have shown us.

Lately, here in Los Angeles, there’s been no shortage of new plays about mothers and daughters. Not all are good, but unlike the rash of plays in the ‘70s where women screamed out their pain and sensitivity, some of this new crop comes to us less burdened by feminist community building.

Cheryl L. West, whose first play, “Before It Hits Home,” was a heavy-handed drama about a family dealing with AIDS, found a confident and light touch for “Jar the Floor,” the story of four generations of mothers and daughters in an African American family. In the delightful interchanges between four distinct women, each personality seems to have been formed in opposition to the one that came just before. “Jar the Floor” may not be “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” but it does show with warmth and insight the force of history in shaping familial bonds, as well as their resistance to history. The play was seen at Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa in 1994, and at Long Beach City College in January.

“Bermuda Avenue Triangle,” the Rene Taylor/Joseph Bologna hit comedy at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills, is first and foremost a showcase for the crack timing of the writer-actors and for their co-star Bea Arthur. But the framing device is a sturdy one: Two daughters convince their recalcitrant aging mothers to move into a condo in Las Vegas. A lot of comedy is gotten from the two basic varieties of mothers, the one whom no daughter can please (Arthur) and the passive-aggressive one (Taylor), afraid to say boo, who is still able to slip in the devastating comment to an ultra-sensitive daughter.

Following “The Apple Doesn’t Fall . . . “ at the Tiffany Theatre will be Diane Samuels’ “Kindertransport,” about a woman who survived the Holocaust as a child. The play examines the woman’s relationship with her birth mother, her adopted one and her own daughter.

All of these playwrights are delineating a relationship with almost no dramatic roots, and certainly no ancient roots. Even Electra, the most famous daughter in all dramatic literature (who convinces her brother Orestes to kill their mother, Clytemnestra), disappears by the end of the play and we see that the whole thing is really Orestes’ problem.

The classical Greek attitude toward mothers can be found in the birth of Athena, who didn’t need a mother to be born--she emerged directly from her father’s head. The Greeks believed that the womb was merely an incubator for a growing fetus; the man’s sperm supplied the vital ingredient of life all on its own. (Thus Aeschylus has Apollo say, in “Eumenides”: “The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just the nurse to the seed. The man is the source of life--the one who mounts. She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps the shoot alive unless god hurts the roots.”)

Of the most famous eponymous mothers in drama, Medea and Mother Courage, we know next to nothing about their actual relationships with their children, all of whom die. That’s because these plays aren’t about mothers and children, they’re about an individual enduring horrible circumstances. The agony they feel in losing (or killing) their children is a theoretical or symbolic one, it is Agony as an ideal, not as a specific loss.

It’s the specific stories that need to be filled in. The mother-daughter play may not yet have found the equivalent in scope and depth of an Edmund and James Tyrone in O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” But it won’t be long now. Of the next generation of playwrights to emerge, many will be women, and they will undoubtedly all have mothers they need to figure out, fight with and forgive. And that’s how a new genre gets born.

‘There weren’t any examples to go by. . . . I kept hearing the skepticism of producers who felt this was not a fitting subject for the stage.’